Search tag: "timelines"

See, it's Hot Shot. In orange. Orange and blue. And white. These colors look gorgeous together. Orange and blue has always been a favorite color combination of mine, which is why Joyce has been in those colors since the beginning of time. Those colors look pretty good on Transformers, too, especially coupled with sheer white. It's a supremely attractive toy.

This is Dion's second toy. His first was a Japanese e-Hobby exclusive redeco of Wheelie, which I also own. Though that version was in yellow and a more saturated blue with cream instead of white, that was also a pretty attractive color scheme. I think the brighter orange/blue/white is better, between the two, but both color schemes work a similar color wheel magic, so they both occupy a similar happy spot in my brain.

The comeback kid

Dion was one of Optimus Prime's work buddies before the war, when Prime's name was Orion Pax and they worked together in a shipping dock. When Megatron and his Decepticon goons encountered the dock early in the war, at first Orion and Dion were in awe of him. But, well, your mind tends to change when those guys reveal they're there kill you and steal your dock's stuff. Orion Pax survived to be rebuilt as Optimus Prime by Alpha Trion, but Dion had no such luck. The original story dropped all mention of Dion once he was shot, and he was presumed dead. The writer of the episode confirmed that Dion was just there to die and fuel Optimus Prime's desire to defeat evil, but, well...

You know fans and patterns. They love them! It's all very Aspergery. Well, Dion just had to be rebuilt into one of Optimus Prime's current buddies like Ironhide or Ultra Magnus. He just had to be! Just like how Cyclonus had to have been made from Skywarp! Patterns! And so Dion's biggest deal for the past 15 years of the online fandom was not who he was, but who he ended up being. This argument was a fool's errand because, you know, he wasn't ever supposed to be anybody and any attempt at an argument is grasping at stuff that just isn't there. So that went round and round and round...

Hey, you missed a spot!

But hey, turns out that Dion is... Dion. The Transformers Collectors' Club decided that Dion survived his ordeal and was rebuilt into a member of the Elite Guard. And this orange Hot Shot clone is what he looks like now. It's okay that he doesn't look anything like Dion did before the accident... it's not like Orion Pax looked terribly much like Optimus Prime! But the color scheme is maintained, and so it's easy to buy this orange and blue Hot Shot as Optimus Prime's old, previously-thought-dead pal.

It helps that Dion is covered in all sorts of paint. This is pretty radical for a Club exclusive, since their first freebie toy offering had a dab of paint here and there and the day was called. Dion is smothered in paint, mostly in service of making him look more like Dion's original color arrangement. I enjoy how much work seemingly went into the deco. Though it seems to hit a snag in vehicle mode. There's a bit of unpaintable plastic right at the front of Dion's car doors.

"So, you like to eat babies?" "Whoa, yeah, how'd you know?"

This is where a blue Autobot logo was placed. And since it's unpaintable there, that means there's a big orange chunk in the upper corner of the logo. It doesn't bother me as much as it does some people; my mind sort of automatically fills in that negative space. If they moved the symbol further back along the door away from the unpaintable patch, that would look worse to me. The symbol has to have room to have blue streamers behind it for the graphic to work, and moving it back would kinda create a worse eyesore.

The toy is as fun as Universe/Henkei! Hot Shot toy was, which isn't very fun, but since I'm not comparing its fun level to the original Hot Shot as much here, it feels more forgivable. Instead, I'm comparing it to Wheelie's toy, which is always very flattering! The joints on Dion are nicely tight except for one of his legs, which likes to pop off at the knee whenever it feels like it.

Well, at least you can't say this Transformers Collectors' Club figure wasn't ambitious.

Universe Sideswipe and Sunstreaker's toys were engineered to be capable of having two different robot modes so that each twin could have their own. That was a call for a Punch/Counterpunch retool if the fandom had ever heard one, and they heard it and they demanded it. They demanded it so much that this guy's preorders sold out in four days, which is unprecedented.

He'll be staying in this mode indefinitely.

Punch is an Autobot who spies on the Decepticons as his alter ego Counterpunch. He's not shown to be especially good at it in the cartoon, since Counterpunch refers to Punch in front of Decepticons as his "Autobot counterpart" and then leaves and then immediately comes back having transformed into him. They share the same vehicle mode and mostly the same color scheme and mostly the same name. It's kind of transparent, but I think that's part of the charm. (It is why I forgive that this new toy's license plate reads "P CTRP," which I would think would telegraph his dual identity fairly immediately. It's like if Clark Kent walked around in a t-shirt that says "SPRMN.")

I've heard Decepticons are small-minded, but...

Sadly, Punch/Counterpunch is another Club-exclusive toy that had some problems along the way. My Seacons had some amazingly bad QC problems, Nightbeat's ears got lopped off, and Heatwave's super robot head had some storage issues. (Oh, and Airazor was the Energon Slugslinger mold, but that's a different kind of problem.)

In P/CP's case, the problem is obviously the size of his head. Look at it! It is comically tiny! He left it in the dryer too long or something. Apparently the factory shrunk his noggin down a size or two without asking if it was okay and then produced the toys and sent them along to America without so much as a "sorry for your loss (of noggin diameter)." We only know about this behind-the-scenes story not from Fun Publications, but from someone who heard it from Fun Publications, which makes me-the-consumer feel all kinds of special. Even if the problem was outside their control and not their fault, it's best to, you know, "control the narrative" or whatever, rather than let conspiracy talk fill the void. That FP has pointedly never shown robot mode images (because they never received samples, they say) sure fueled the fires.

You gonna cry, baby? You gonna cry? Are ya?

Anyway, it's a tiny head. It's not so bad as Counterpunch, since his face is a little more abstract than Punch's. Plus Punch's hood chest is much wider and bigger than Counterpunch's rooftop chest, so that just dwarfs it even more. Punch also gets the worse configuration of the legs so I think I'm going to be keeping him as Counterpunch. This is just as well, since I'm gonna have three of this mold as Autobots by the time Red Alert comes out this fall.

Punch's face seems sculpted into an emotion I would call "on the verge of a breakdown." His eyes are narrow and his eyebrows raised in the middle, like he's about to cry. The strong downturned lines at the edges of his mouth don't help. Punch is often characterized as an emotional and mental wreck anyway, so I suppose that works for him.

Good thing I have my friend the screwdriver.

The head wasn't the only problem as I took him out of the packaging. Mine was misassembled, which meant Counterpunch's roof chest wouldn't rotate all the way into robot mode configuration. It stayed cocked at an angle, and any attempt to force it further would remove it from its hinge. Great! I learned later that this is fixable if you take apart his torso with a screwdriver (five screws!) and fiddle around with the head piece and the gear teeth inside. (See, his toy has a "head reveal" gimmick that raises his head as you rotate the chest piece.) This took me an hour and much trial and error. The gear teeth don't want to stay where you want them to as you screw it all back together. The gear teeth are very small and shallow, so even the tiniest nudge will result in everything back to being fudged up when you get those five screws back in.

Three people in #wiigii! so far have reported having this problem. It might be widespread, or maybe our IRC channel is just that unlucky.

God, I love those red hubcaps.

But he's not a total loss or anything. There are things I like about him. He's Punch/Counterpunch, to start out with, which is an awesome 1987 character choice. I like the little paint touches that distinguish Punch from Counterpunch, like the purple and green on the tailgate to make Counterpunch feel more Decepticonny. I like the use of rub symbols! There's two of them, one on each robot mode's chest. (This unfortunately means that Punch's vehicle mode is always a Decepticon, but oh wells.) I also like that his headlights are painted over in vehicle mode to better match his original toy. I also really like Punch's yellow face. That might be another factory mistake, according to how he's presented in art, but it's one I'm thankful for. I like his yellow face.

And again: ambition.

It's too bad. It's an awesome club toy that's mired in an unfortunate accident. How much you still like him depends on how well you'll cope with his pinheadedness. It doesn't bother some, and Transformers aren't really known for having human proportions anyway. It doesn't bother me much in Counterpunch mode, but Punch just makes me laugh. He's not a total loss. It's just... unfortunate.

I was really hoping to have access to my Giant Wall Of Toy Bins before getting to talking about Timelines Side Burn, but our basement is still a mess from the move. It's still the place where we shove everything that we don't know yet what to do with. So no photos of Side Burn with Timelines Sky-Byte. Or with Classics Prowl! D'oh.

Man, getting this guy was an adventure. Fun Publications sends their Collectors' Club incentive toys via third-class mail. Third class mail doesn't care about your fancy mail forwarding! You can forward your mail all you want, and watch how many f***s third class mail does not give. I found this out a few weeks ago when I called FP to give them my new address. It was also too late, I found out, to get the mailing label altered! So, great. Long story short, two days after we were officially out of our old house, I was reaching my arm down into the mailbox that deposits inside the building. I was stealing my own mail! (The landlord lives in San Diego, so she wouldn't be of any particular, immediate help.) But hooray! Side Burn get. Well, Side Burns. Grabbed my roommate's, too.

Side Burn is intended to be a Generation 1 version of the Robots in Disguise character. In RiD, Side Burn was a fun guy, but his toy was horrible. It was a mess. Side Burn is one of the reasons why the fandom has the term "shellformer" in their vocabulary arsenal. And so years and years ago, when I was thinning out my collection to pay some bills, he was one of the first to go. Easy decision.

And here he is, back again! And in a more tolerable form! Classics Rodimus, the toy he's redecoed from, isn't really a terrific mold or anything -- he's got some articulation annoyances, for example -- but he's leagues beyond RID Side Burn. And so I heartily welcome my newer, better Side Burn. The translation of Side Burn's deco to Rodimus's toy is near flawless. It's amazing. The particular shade of desaturated blue (bordering on indigo) is very striking, and all the tiny little dabs of paint here and there really sell him as Side Burn. He's even got his larger targeting monocle painted over one of his eyes, and elements of his deco are asymmetrical. It's a commendable job.

His profile card, on the other hand, is a relentless siege on the English language. It embarrasses me as a literate fan of Transformers, and we shall not speak more of it.

If the Side Burn toy has a downside, it's the age of the mold. Side Burn isn't as solid as previous iterations of the toy, and when you go to pull his shoulders out during transformation, his ball-jointed arms are likely to remove themselves instead. I choose to interpret this as an homage to the original Side Burn, who had similar cohesion problems.

Here's Side Burn impersonating a war hero to get into these ladies' robopants. Classy.

One more thing. The original Side Burn's "thing" was that he hit on red cars. He was on Earth during Robots in Disguise, and so his running gag was he'd go ga-ga over the dumb (and red) unsentient vehicles driven by the humans around him. It was kind of weird, and it didn't speak much for Side Burn's intelligence, but it was cute. Timelines Side Burn, however, is still on Cybertron. He has to hit on red cars, as per his M.O., and so the red cars he hits on are sentient females. Somehow this is creepier. I can't explain why. I can't even really defend why. Finding your own species attractive should be more normal, versus hitting on inanimate objects. Maybe it's because directing his traditional behavior towards beings with minds makes adorable ol' Side Burn into a womanizer, which is generally less endearing.

Yay, the 2012 Transformers Collectors' Club membership figure, Runamuck, arrived in my mailbox today! That is super good, because not only was his inseparable buddy Runabout fairly lonely, but because it arrived before I head out to BotCon tomorrow evening. Sweeeeeet. (I will have a table in the Artist Alley again this year.)

I will say this: Runamuck (white) is waaaaaaaay way prettier than Runabout (black). It's the cream and the orange and the gold. They're just empirically more interesting than black/red/silver. That's right, I'm stating it as a fact. Try and stop me!

There isn't much left to say about the mold itself that I haven't said already. This is my fourth version of it (Tracks/Wheeljack/Runabout) and I'm going to be getting a fifth version of it tomorrow night at BotCon (SG Tracks). It's a good mold, so if I'm gonna have a lot of something, this is a good thing to have a lot of. And they're all characters I like, so even more bonus. (Well, I don't know what SG Tracks' personality is yet, but he's visually Road Rage, who I do like. If I end up hating SG Tracks, I'll be happy to pretend he's Road Rage instead.)

Woo, Overlord! ...well, "Gigatron," for trademark reasons. "Gigatron" was what Overlord was called in America when he was sold as a "Heroes of Cybertron" PVC figure a decade ago, so when Hasbro still can't use "Overlord," that's still the obvious substitute.

I was excited for Overlord because I didn't have an Overlord. He was a very large and very expensive double Powermaster guy that was sold in Japan and Europe but not here. I was pretty apathetic to him until he starred in "Last Stand of the Wreckers," and that sure didn't hurt his toy's street value, no. But now I have this one, which is Bludgeon with a new head. And oh how he's Bludgeon with a new head. It's kind of hard to miss it. Bludgeon's new toy was so very Bludgeon, you see. Like, all of him, from head to toe. Replacing his head doesn't really hide the Bludgeonyness.

But I'll deal. The Bludgeon toy itself is pretty damn amazing, and I have sung its praises, so regardless of its appropriateness, it's nice to have a character I like as a toy I like. There are a few things I am careful with, though. I'm actually on my second Bludgeon, since I broke my first one's hand by trying to put the sword in there. So I am probably not going to be doing that with Overlord very much. I can't go down to the store and get another of him for $20. Also, when you transform him, his nose kinda grazes the inside of his own chest. I've already dabbed his nostrils with a silver Sharpie marker to cover up where I rubbed off some paint. Thank goodness his face color is silver.